This research investigates the potential of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to infer building typologies: Construction, Current Use, and Storeys from Google Street View (GSV) images. Predictions generated by VLMs are compared with inference by human experts (civil engineers and architects) as a source of manually labelled ground-truth data. We evaluate several state-of-the-art VLMs, including GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 2.0 Flash. By applying different scaling strategies and prompting techniques, we found that Chain-of-Thought prompts provide an overall more stable model performance. We also investigate the reasoning behind VLMs' building-typology predictions by examining the probabilities of keywords appearing in AI explanations. This enabled us to analyse patterns in these reasonings and identify key themes driving both agreements and disagreements between VLM and expert labels. We find that AI tends to focus on visual indicators, whereas human experts place greater emphasis on broader contextual cues and domain knowledge, in addition to visual cues. Overall, VLM can approximate experts' capability in building-typology classification at scale, with an average accuracy of approximately 70%. The study demonstrates the VLM's potential for AI automation in tasks that require pattern recognition and object identification in an urban context. AI have the potential to serve as complementary and collaborative tools for urban analysis, leveraging their strengths in understanding visual patterns. This study contributes to the exploration of the efficiency and scalability of AI visual prediction and provides insights into the reasoning processes that could support automation processes in urban analysis and prediction.
High-quality singing annotations are fundamental to modern Singing Voice Synthesis (SVS) systems. However, obtaining these annotations at scale through manual labeling is unrealistic due to the substantial labor and musical expertise required, making automatic annotation highly necessary. Despite their utility, current automatic transcription systems face significant challenges: they often rely on complex multi-stage pipelines, struggle to recover text-note alignments, and exhibit poor generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) singing data. To alleviate these issues, we present VocalParse, a unified singing voice transcription (SVT) model built upon a Large Audio Language Model (LALM). Specifically, our novel contribution is to introduce an interleaved prompting formulation that jointly models lyrics, melody, and word-note correspondence, yielding a generated sequence that directly maps to a structured musical score. Furthermore, we propose a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) style prompting strategy, which decodes lyrics first as a semantic scaffold, significantly mitigating the context disruption problem while preserving the structural benefits of interleaved generation. Experiments demonstrate that VocalParse achieves state-of-the-art SVT performance on multiple singing datasets. The source code and checkpoint are available at https://github.com/pymaster17/VocalParse.